I'm also having some problems with them - not with PFI but free listings. I notice form the positiontech database that my site is listed there number 15 but when i do a search in MSN the site dissapears? While all the sites above & below me are listed only mine is not?

I have been in constant contact with the reseller, and they keep promising that it will be sorted out, but it has been 21 days now or thereabouts. Kindly, they have extended the payment period by a couple of weeks, but this is getting silly.

There is apparently a technical issue somewhere between the reseller, Inktomi and the site in question. And it isn't at our end AFAIK; the site has been up for months, gets plenty of visitors and is well spidered by the other crawlers.

Ahh... I knew we weren't alone. There was another thread started on this exact issue about a week ago. THere's been considerablt response, but not enough for how widespread the problem is. Ink has some huge issues right now.

Good clean pages are getting dropped like crazy and they all seem to be PFI. Resellers deny it, Ink denies it. There is definately a dupe content filter on at Inktomi. And Ink can't index redirects from other sites correctly either (it sees them as duplicate content). So many bugs!

Are all of you still seeing major problems with your PFI pages? PFI is really quite dangerous as far as I'm concerned. I never had any problems with Ink listings until I signed up with PFI, then my pages keep getting dropped out.

I don't know how I could ever recomend PFI to anybody with a straight face. It's really quite a buggy system. As far as my experience goes, PFI brings nothing but trouble.

I only recently was tracking Ink, but from my past previous experiences with INk, after doing PFI sites got up & maintained well. But now, it's like I don't know? Probally they had an algo change, applied dozens of filters.

I think they are sort of using Alltheweb's approach, not letting anyone know what they are up to by switching here & there.

Well if they want to run a PFI business, that's not really the way to go. If they remain like that, then they better be a google2.

I am experiencing problems with PFI. I submitted a couple of home pages from different sites three months ago.

Until signing up for PFI the pages ranked quite well. The reason for PFI was the fact the content changes on these sites on a daily basis and thought it would be a good idea to get the pages refreshed in the index more frequently.

The pages are clean and I do not employ any SEO methods, just content and good page titles.

For a while the pages seemed ok but recently both have disappeared and even when you search on company name within quotes the sites are listed in last position out of 300 or so results. When you search for any terms relevant to the sites they are either not listed or display bottom of the pile.

What I have noticed is that some of the sites are appearing higher when I search on company name appear to have exact duplicate titles, although the URLs take the form of www.domain.com/cgi-bin/jump.cgi?id=123, when you click on the link it takes you to my sites. Are these sites somehow hijacking my content and causing my sites to be penalised due to a duplicate content filter?

you are definitely not alone. This is the exact kind of thing I have been dealing with since July. After contacting the reseller I went through and getting more and more insistant this was finally rectified in my case, just a couple of weeks ago, but now I keep wondering how long till the next bug is going to send a site to oblivion.

It is also worth saying that if your site has been around a while and isn't in Inktomi, then it is probably already banned - so don't risk paying for the PFI; there is a no money back policy for submitting banned sites.

It did indeed take around six months to get into Ink, but they have been spidering heavily ever since and we had 100s of pages in the index.

Something appeared to happen around the middle of Dec, when all ink referals stopped. When I checked, all free pages were gone and only a few PFI pages remained. Those pages have also bombed in the serps.

Interestingly Altavista referals have done the opposite and one site now has 4% from them. They are also the most active spider on our sites.

dawlish - Did you ever get this situation resolved or are you still trying to figure out what happened and how you can get your PFI page re-included? Our PFI page (which is our homepage) is still MIA. I have spent literally over 40 hours on this problem testing multiple pages, tracking down sites who had copied my content and getting them to remove it etc. etc. I am still nowhere to be seen in the serps. I'm at a complete loss.

We are keyword.com and our front page PFI doesn't show up anywhere at all... not even in the top 500 results.

Has anyone here found out what is triggering the PFI pages to get dropped? Like I said, I am completely baffled.

Ya - I have stickied Tim. He's been very helpful and we are still trying to get to the bottom of it. Ours is just a PFI page that disappeared... not the entire site. Thus indicating that it wasn't a "spam" penalty or anything like that. We also got confirmation from an Ink rep that our site has not received a penalty.

No, our free pages are listed just fine. It's just the PFI page that we submitted and it's been dropped completely. It will show up if you do a search for that url, but not for anything else. Not even a search for the name of our site. Like I said, we are keyword.com and if you do a search for keyword, you don't see our PFI page anywhere in the results.

Anyone else that has seen their PFI pages disappear also have their site in looksmart?

I can't ever quite figure out the relationship with looksmart and INK, but I pulled funds from Looksmart and my Ink listings disappeared around the same time.

Perhaps if you are out of Looksmart, and you PFI, for some reason, Ink just drops your PFI page until you get back in looksmart (which puts you back in the the zeal directory).

I'm fishing here... All theories and attempts seem to be getting me back where I started.

Very confusing to me. All I know is that my PFI page is gone from Ink with no explanation or "penalty." All signs seem to indicate that the problem is only affecting PFI pages. So weird.

snort - do you see any correlation between the pages that have been dropped? Are they in looksmart? Could Ink be treating an internal page as if it were your index page? Any duplicate content floating around out there? Any other theories? I'm frustrated and running out of ideas.